The 2011 class blog for students taking COM115.9, a course on contemporary horror cinema.

Session 9

The fact that David Caruso was in the movie made me feel weird the whole time because his acting remains the same for all the roles he takes for either television or film and it wasn’t easy to take him seriously. Despite this, Session 9 was a fun film for me, one that doesn’t really have to make me go through the whole process of thinking things over and over to enjoy the movie. It was interesting to watch the interaction of an all male cast with each other, and how they’re coping with each others’ personalities inside an abandoned building full of asbestos and a certain sense of dread with it being an old mental institution. Session 9 comes from a series of recordings discovered by one of the characters in the film of a person with a multiple personality disorder. What was creepy about it was that the person was able to convincingly change voices to man or a woman with relative ease. Initially, I thought that the main cause of the problem was the fact that the guys were working in a poisonous environment, but it was later revealed that Gordon held an evil personality in him, called Simon which encouraged him to carry out attacks against his own family and his co-workers. Simon said that he lived in the weak and the wounded and it was this phrase that became the turning point of the whole situation, making me think that all this time, one of the guys was the one committing the atrocities. I was disappointed however by the Mary Hobbes subplot, where they were discovering all sorts of artifacts and materials regarding her and her personalities but in the end, it didn’t really have a connection with Gordon’s story. Thus, it’s led me to believe that the fact that Simon was present in both Mary Hobbes and Gordon makes him more than an isolated personality as it actually shows itself to be a consciousness present in different people. Is he an evil spirit or an intangible being that could transmit himself through different mediums? That I wouldn’t know but the fact that this movie is a psychological horror film leads further credence to the possibility that the human mind is capable of things which are unnatural and plausible at the same time. The progression of the story in terms of the eventual reveal of the monster, or the satisfaction of my curiosity according to Noel Carroll was all over the place though. The story had too much weird stuff happening all at the same time that it was really hard to focus on a single person. For example, the conflict between Phil and Hank and Hank’s finding of hidden treasure made me distracted from time to time from the overall plot. The reveal of the killer wasn’t that satisfying but at least they reached that point in the end. Despite this, I loved the imagery and overall ambiance of the film, where it was enclosed, dark and silent all throughout. The imagery of the solitary chair that Gordon sees from time to time may also be a reflection of his state of mind, where it is afar from reality and the use of a mental patient’s chair already indicates that there’s something wrong. Overall, it was still a fun movie and it was a fitting end for the Horror film class.